We have the rare privilege of being born as human beings and we desire to live happily in this world. Pain and sorrow, trials and tribulations, these provide the incentive to thin about the course of our lives, about the cause of our griefs, and the way to overcome them. Our present troubles are the efface of some cause, near or remote.

R E L A T E D

This ultimate cause of our suffering must be spotted out and destroyed. All other remedies will be only temporary and palliative. If the root cause is not tackled, the suffering is bound to recur, if not in the same form, in some other manner.

Great religious leaders directed their attention to its discovery and each of them offered a solution, which, he felt, was the best to eradicate it. The Budda was oppressed by the sufferings he found all around him. He sought out various teachers: but none of the methods suggested by them appealed to him. Finally, he sat in meditation under the Bodhi tree and enlightenment dawned on him. He felt that the only way to remain unaffected by any trouble is to realise that everything in the world is an illusion, and, in that realisation, to remain unaffected by pain as well as pleasure.

Christianity did not correlate sin and sufferings as cause and effect. According to it, all men are sinners, and can expiate their sins only by believing in Christ. It also averred that the present is the only life allotted to us, and salvation is a case of now or never. There is no future or past life according to that religion. It is the same with Islam also.